This chapter describes how your application can support finding text, dates, or your own data types in its data. If you want users to be able to use the system's Find service to locate data in your application, you should be familiar with the material discussed in this chapter.

Before reading this chapter, you should understand the concept of the target of an action, explained in Chapter 15, "Filing." Familiarity with using views to image data, covered in Chapter 3, "Views," is also helpful. If your application stores data as soup entries, you should understand the contents of Chapter 11, "Data Storage and Retrieval."

This chapter is divided into two main parts:

"About the Find Service" describes the core user interface to the Find service, along with variations and optional features. A compatibility section covers differences between the current version of the Find service and previous ones.

"Using the Find Service" provides a technical overview of Find operations, with code examples to show how to implement support for this service in your application.

In addition, the "Find Reference" (page 13-1) in Newton Programmer's Referenceprovides complete descriptions of all Find service data structures, functions, and methods.

About the Find Service

16

The Find service searches for occurrences of data items the user specifies on a Find slip. The Find slip may be supplied by the system or by the developer. Figure 16-1 illustrates the system-supplied Find slip.